3.2. Rationale and Union added value

Neither Union funding alone nor Member States individually will be able to address this challenge. Although Member States have introduced reforms to improve their tertiary education institutions and modernise their training systems, progress is still uneven across Europe, with big differences between countries. Overall, scientific and technological cooperation between the public and private sectors generally remains weak in Europe. The same applies to gender equality and to the efforts to attract students and researchers from outside the ERA. Currently around 20 % of the doctoral candidates in the Union are citizens of third countries, whereas about 35 % in the United States come from abroad. To speed up this change, a strategic approach that goes beyond national borders is required at Union level. Union funding is crucial to create incentives for and encourage the indispensable structural reforms. The Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions have made remarkable progress to promote mobility, both transnational and intersectoral, and to open research careers at European and international level, with excellent employment and working conditions following the principles of the European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers. There is no equivalent in Member States as far as their scale and scope, funding, international character, generation and transfer of knowledge are concerned. They have strengthened the resources of those institutions able to attract researchers internationally and thereby encouraged the spread of centres of excellence around the Union. They have served as a role model with a pronounced structuring effect by spreading their best practices at national level. The bottom-up approach taken by Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions has also allowed a large majority of those institutions to train and upgrade the skills of a new generation of researchers able to tackle societal challenges. Further development of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions will make a significant contribution to development of the ERA. With their Europe-wide competitive funding structure, Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions will, whilst respecting the principle of subsidiarity, encourage new, creative and innovative types of training such as joint or multiple doctoral degrees and industrial doctorates, involving research, innovation and education players who will have to compete globally for a reputation of excellence. By providing Union funding for the best research and training programmes following the principles for innovative doctoral training in Europe, they will also promote wider dissemination and take-up, moving towards more structured doctoral training. Marie Skłodowska-Curie grants will also be extended to the temporary mobility of experienced researchers and engineers from public institutions to the private sector or vice versa, thereby encouraging and supporting universities, research centres and businesses, and other socio-economic actors to cooperate with one another on a European and international scale. With the aid of their well-established, transparent and fair evaluation system, Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions will identify excellent talents in research and innovation in an international competition which gives prestige and therefore motivation for researchers to advance their career in Europe. The societal challenges to be addressed by highly skilled R&I staff are not just Europe's problem. These are international challenges of colossal complexity and magnitude. The best researchers in Europe and in the world need to work together across countries, sectors and disciplines. Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions will play a key role in this respect by supporting staff exchanges that will foster collaborative thinking through international and intersectoral knowledge-sharing that is so crucial for open innovation. The co-funding mechanism of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions will be crucial to expand Europe's pool of talents. The numerical and structural impact of Union action will be increased by leveraging regional, national and international funding, both public and private, to create new programmes with similar and complementary goals and to adapt existing ones to international and intersectoral training, mobility and career development. Such a mechanism will forge stronger links between research and education efforts at national and Union level. All the activities under this challenge will contribute to creating a whole new mindset in Europe that is crucial for creativity and innovation. Marie Skłodowska-Curie funding measures will strengthen pooling of resources in Europe and thereby lead to improvements in coordination and governance of researchers' training, mobility and career development. They will contribute to the policy goals outlined in the flagship initiatives 'Innovation Union', 'Youth on the Move' and 'Agenda for New Skills and Jobs' and will be vital to turn the ERA into reality. The Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions will therefore be developed in close synergy with other programmes supporting these policy objectives, including the Erasmus+ programme and the KICs of the EIT.

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-11-03 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.